Reporting Chinese politics

Hidden news

The rumour mill goes into overdrive

IN AN earlier era, it would have been the sort of scurrilous rumour picked up by scandal sheets in Hong Kong but only whispered in Beijing: the high-profile right-hand man of a prominent Politburo member gets wind that he is about to be cashiered by the authorities and flees to an American consulate seeking protection (fate unknown). Even 15 years ago, most of mainland China would have heard nothing and Chinese officialdom could have remained comfortably silent.

Today such rumours, scurrilous or not, are not so much whispered as bruited by megaphone by Chinese citizens themselves, via websites and microblogs. Chinese-language news outlets and websites based in America and Hong Kong, many of them notoriously unreliable, now have a potential audience of hundreds of millions for their political gossip, and just as many possible sources. More than 300m Chinese internet users have at least one microblog account, and some use virtual private networks (VPNs) to get around the infamous “great firewall” of China. The Chinese government is being dragged, click by click, out of its cone of silence.

So it is with the drama of Wang Lijun, once celebrated as the mob-busting police chief of the south-western metropolis of Chongqing. Mr Wang also serves as a deputy mayor under the city's ambitious party boss, Bo Xilai, who may join the all-powerful standing committee of the Politburo this year. On February 1st Mr Wang was shuffled to other duties in Chongqing. The next day Mingjing News, a website in New York which trades in gossip about the Chinese leadership, reported that Mr Wang was under investigation for corruption. The report initially drew only minor notice among China-watchers.

That changed on the night of February 7th, when netizens reported, via Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like microblog service, a heavy police presence outside the American consulate in the nearby city of Chengdu. From this thin reed of fact came a thicket of online rumours that Mr Wang had fled to the consulate to seek asylum. It turns out he did go to the consulate, meeting officials “in his capacity as vice mayor”, according to America's State Department. He walked out of his own accord.

On February 8th the Chongqing authorities chose to speak up. Mr Wang, they said on their microblog, had health problems, and was receiving “vacation-style treatment”. The statement was retweeted more than 30,000 times within an hour. One person who seized on the phrase was Li Zhuang, a lawyer who served 18 months in prison after defending a gangland boss arrested in a crackdown orchestrated by Mr Wang. “I would like to offer free legal advice to all the ‘sick people' who are having vacation-style treatments,” he tweeted. Censors seemed unable or unwilling to block the flood of joking and commentary.

Ho Pin, who publishes Mingjing News, thinks the flood is unstoppable. “There's unprecedented support for exposing the rich and powerful,” he says, which means watching Chinese politics may become more enjoyable—unless you are an official.

What really happened at the American consulate in Chengdu? And what has become of Mr Wang? In the absence of a detailed official statement, many will be keeping an eye on another China-watching website, Duowei News based in America. It was founded by Mr Ho but is now under new management. In July Duowei was first to debunk a report that Jiang Zemin, a former Chinese president, had died. China's official news service, Xinhua, quashed the rumour the following day.

Gathering news about Chinese leaders remains a risky business, especially if the news is accurate, when it is open to the catch-all charge of “revealing state secrets”. No surprise perhaps that the office inside a vast office complex on the outskirts of Beijing that apparently houses Duowei's China bureau has no brass plate in the lobby; the man inside refused to greet The Economist. The Hong Kong media mogul who owns the website, Yu Pun-hoi, also declined to be interviewed, saying that Duowei is “a very small business”. Its business—the news of Chinese politics—is, however, only going to get bigger.